1950/60's Format Wars! Was there vinyl / reel to reel debate?

This sounds like a discussion from another planet, almost.

Although I had a handful of reel-to-reel tapes, the selection in shops always seemed tiny (I'm thinking specifically of late '60s/early '70s). Reel-to-reel (and later cassette) for me and most of my friends was for recording a new LP, and then using the reel (or cassette) for playback (to spare the LP from degradation.) Plus, you could vary the speed on the reel-to-reel tape to get more LPs on a single tape. Great for parties! I had at least one 3600-ft. Scotch reel with six albums on!

Edit: Agitater made my point first.

 

thanks for all the replies! I always aspired to a reel to reel tape recorder, simply because I thought they looked so cool. I wondered why they never became truly mainstream and it is apparent that it was the reason I never bought one - they're too expensive!

 

The best part of owning a reel to reel deck, of course was that you could take a bunch of Lps from your favorite group and make your own 12 track greatest hits , as if you were the A&R guy, and even label the tape with your own title.

 

Another thing to remember too, is that the mentality of the audiophile in 1957 was very different, almost opposite of today. Today, the consumer is king and we have tons of choices, not so in 1957. In 1957, Hi Fi was still really, really new, and folks were just happy to get ANYTHING in Hi Fi sound. People used to have Hi Fi Parties, where other young couples would come over with some of their records and folks would sit around, drink Highballs, listen and enjoy the sound. If you had stereo in your setup, you were the envy of the local audiophile group. A big thing back then was to "convert" your mono setup to stereo by making a trip downtown to your local Hi Fi dealer, and installing a new stereo cartridge in your TT, and adding a second amp and a second speaker. Imagine the thrill of starting that project on a lazy fall Saturday afternoon, and playing your first Stereo Lp right after dinner. Great days.

 

Don’t know if this is completely relevant for this topic, but perhaps can be of some interest – during this period hundreds of millions of people from the Eastern Europe and Soviet Union didn’t have access to any western pre-recorded music (partly for political/ideological restriction, but mainly because of the lack of hard currency to pay for licensing), and the vinyl production was mainly local pop music and classical, so having a reel to reel was a must (some cheap all in one reel to reel in most cases), in order to hear what the world listens to. The system worked like this – someone (sailors, diplomats, etc.) manage to smuggle some records, and they were recorded on blank reel-to-reels, and finally, from person to person, everyone had it (often – after 100 generations of re-recordings). This trend continued during the 70’s and 80’s with cassettes, so actually vinyl never was the main format for the people living in this part of the world.

 

Why was tape so expensive? Could it have been less so? Curious

 

Like CD's, reel-2-reel tapes had no skips, ticks or pops since it's introduction and was possibly what made the format popular to audiophiles starting in the 50's. The early stereo tapes were 2-tracks with both tracks running in the same direction. RCA also introduced a huge cassette type of 2-track stereo tapes to be more convenient than r2r tapes which you had to thread. The 4-tracks with 2 stereo tracks running in opposite directions came later. Philips introduced the 4-track compact cassette later.
With the most common speeds of pre-recorded r2r tapes, 3 3/4 & 7 1/2 ips, tape hiss was a detraction.
Reel-2-reel tapes were made well into the 70's and the final resurgence was due to discrete quadraphonic 4-track. Although being overshadowed by the Q8 quadraphonic 8-track cartridges(more convenient but of the lowest quality), quadraphonic r2r tape was about the only way to hear a high quality true quadraphonic recording. All r2r quadraphonic tapes were 7 1/2 ips. The vinyl record versions of quadraphonic were mostly on 3 non-compatible formats, 2 of which, QS & SQ, were not discrete and the CD-4 discrete version was problematic with lower fidelity.
So, the way I see it, quadraphonic 4-track was r2r's last hoorah.

 

Unlike making records - take a hunk of plastic, heat it up and stamp it and you're essentially done - tape required much more effort.

You start with iron ore, grind it up, treat it with various additives, and then coat it onto a binder (which also required several steps). Then, each tape had to be individually recorded, unlike the stamping of records. Even at 3-/34 ips, this took time. And then it had to be wound onto a reel and boxed.

Unlike a previous poster's comments, I think the petroleum shortage of the '70s was the direct cause of the change to 3-3/4, not reduced duplication time. It was also, I believe, responsible for the use of cheaper plastics in records as well as tape. One of the advantages of 8 tracks over 4 tracks is that they used half as much tape for the same playing time. Nobody cared about SQ on a 4 or 8 track; it sure mattered on reels.

Cheers,
Larry B.

 

I dare say, very cool.

 

Sinatra's custom made 3 channel system for playing 3 track master tape copies, typical of the era however, the listener is facing away from the speakers. This was necessary in advertisement to display both the subjects and the equipment... an image of comfort and casual enjoyment.

 

Probably the coolest audiophile pic ever.

 

Gotta keep Bowser from chowing down on that bowl full of packs of smokes...

 

No cos I always used twin track stereo but had heard it on four track stereo machines.

 

It's true that there was a lot more involved in making magnetic recording tape than evem making the vinyl used to press records and tape always cost more, but, as anything else, prices dropped over time. Into the 80's, I bought many Maxell UD and UD XL I 1800' reels of tape for $5. or less. I bought tons of high quality cassette 90 minute blanks for $1.50 or less. Pre-recorded r2r tapes sold for $1. more than an LP and those which were 3 3/4 ips sold for the same price. Pre-recorded 4 and 8-track tape carts., when new, cost about the same as LP's and after 8-track took over, 4-tracks were selling for $1. or less. The snap-in adapters so that you could play a 4-track on an 8-track player cost almost as much than the 4-tracks.

Possibly you are thinking about several tape recorders recording what another was playing at normal speed, like they did with old Edison cylinder records? Not so.

Though duplicating any tapes was also more involved, the duplicating companies had banks of machines and the tapes were duplicated at high speeds. Tape duplicating machines cost a fraction of the price of a record press. Material costs were still in the pennies. Production was a snap!

 

You could still get a few Reel to Reels from Columbia House until the early 80s. Fleetwood Mac's Mirage and Winton Marseilles' classical album are the two latest ones I have. The format died a quick death after the introduction of the CD. Even 8-tracks hung around longer.

 

I wouldn't advise running the tapes that close to the speakers! And are those cigarette packs in that bowl?

 

No, I'm very familiar with the tape duplicating process. Even running at many times playback speed, it still took longer to duplicate a tape than to stamp out a record, plus a lot more handwork...and I'd venture that even at "pennies", material cost for a R2R was significantly higher than for an LP.

8 tracks were always more than LPs. A common list price for a stereo LP was $4.98, the equivalent 8T was $6.98 or more. I know, I was selling them back then. And the only reason you could find 4 tracks for $1 was in the discontinued "dump" bins at Woolworth's or Kresge's.

As far as the 4T adapter, yes it was the price of a tape, but you could move it from tape to tape - so you only needed one.

Cheers,
Larry B.

 

Sure it took longer to dupe a tape and vinyl or polystyrene was considerably less expensive, that's a given. But, none of that was cost prohibitive and as many tapes could be manufactured as the public wanted to buy . On top of that, the pre-recorded tapes used a lower quality of tape than a person could buy blanks for.
I do remember most any tape costing only a dollar more than an LP. I think that the most expensive 8-track I ever bought was the Chicago III album. I think it cost $6.98 for a double LP on one cart.
Yep. The 4-tracks were in clearance bins. Where I bought a few was a chain department store out here in California called Whitefront. At the same time, you could find some of the same albums in the cut-out bins for $.97 to $1. at K-mart or Woolworth's. Sometimes they'd be on sale 2/$1.

 

I'm a label. I make most of my profit on LP's. I've got this giant-killer of a format, just like the ones in the studio, requiring the audio enthusiast to fork over what, 5-6x the cost of his rekkid playa, to play my reels. So no, that's always gonna be a niche format. What can I do to make it cheaper? Nothing, until we can bring down the cost of the hardware some way. Cheaper tape? Not until we can start selling more of it, at a lower price point, how's THAT gonna happen. What can I do to make it better? Well, I could up the playback speed to 15 ips, but they're already 5x the price of an LP at 7.5 ips. So there's just no profit, in trying to make a profit out of that!

Besides, we just sold all the nouveau suburbanites on, "a new stereophonic sound spectacular" with these LP's, NOW I gotta go back and say, we were kidding, you need an exponentially-larger outlay if you expect your space-age bachelor pad rig to be better than the Jonses'?

I'm already makin' bank on tiki records with bird calls in the background. Whattya say, let's not push it.

Besides, Nipper's starting to push these funny little records with a big hole, and 2-4 songs each, for the bargain crowd, so we gotta add 45 rpm to the phnographs. Kids are getting fairy tales and nursery rhymes on those Little Golden doo-dads, so we can't drop the 78 speed from our rekkid playas either. Neither of those are gonna carry-over onto a reel-to-reel product to add to a tape machine, it's a non-starter: they're being pitched to a totally different customer.

So, let's make just enough reel-to-reel machines so Frankie can sit in front of his big-a** speaker consoles and pose with his ciggies and his dog, and call it a day.

I'm a record label. I've been a record label since before we recorded electrically. Before we even THINK of doing anything more...customers want their Perry Como on a record.

 

Don't sugar coat it! How do ya really feel

 

Me? I've been in radio for 35+ years...I'm actually pretty ambivalent to playing with reels when I'm done with work...

 

Best Sgt Pepper I heard was with 15"ips tape playback.

 

Back in the 70's, when I was in radio, tape became the main format we used. For the automated stations, the announcing(sometimes live) and music was on r2r tapes running at 15 ips, the time announcement was on 2 huge tape cartridges(like the pre-4-track car tape players) with odd time on 1 cart and even on the other. The commercials were on what were basically like the 4-track tape cartridges, but either 2-track stereo or full-track mono, and were held and played in units which looked like Ferris wheels. There were no DJ's usually but just an attendant to change and rewind the reels.

For bigger radio stations with live DJ's, like those associated with the Drake-Shenault "Boss Radio" format, the music was on what was again essentially 4-track type tape cartridges running at 7 1/2 ips and were either 2-track stereo or full-track mono, as were the pre-recorded commercials. Many stations had atleast 2 triple-stack tape players. Depending on the capacity of the carts, a single song on each cart could be recorded several times and there were tones at the end and/or beginning of each song so that after a tape was played, it would cue itself up at the start of the next song so all the DJ had to do was to pop the cart in or start it. Radio stations used tape carts well into the 90's as well as the r2r tapes.

Prices of tape and the recorders dropped into the 60's so the everyman could afford them. The 8-track revolution put pre-recorded tape in cars on a large scale and even overflowing into the home stereo market so you could use the tapes in your car and your house. Starting around 1968, I remember car manufacturers offering add-on cassette decks. 8-track options in new cars continued into the 80's, but cassette was more prevalent.

Magnetic recording tape became a mainstay, especially with cassettes, into the CD age, but since you could record your own CD's on your computer, the CD took over and with mp3 and .wav files, radio stations progressed to digital music.

 

I remember everything you're talking about, although I probably jumped into radio a couple-few years behind you...let me just correct one little blip...

There ya go...!

 

Was there vinyl / reel to reel debate? The concept of a debate now is very different to a debate in the 50/60's. Now we have the internet, where any member of the public can share his/her viewpoint to a global forum on sites like this. In the 50/60's there were a few electronics/audio magazines, and it was up to the editor to decide what debate occurred. The readership could contribute to a debate by sending a letter to the editor, however it was up to the editor to decide if he would publish the letter.

It's my perception that tape was regarded as a niche high-end format by audiophiles in it's day, and that tape machines were reasonably common in households until they were replaced by the compact cassette. Given the limited number of manufactures of equipment and the longer time between model releases, my observation of magazines of the time is that there was less of a debate, more a commentary of "these are the current options available".